Proseminar: Information Theory

Name

Content

Information Theory provides the foundation for two important problems:

How can data be compressed most effectively? Typical scenarios would be the compression of text as zip, music as mp3 and picture data as jpeg.

How can data be nearly lossless transfered over a instable band? A typical scenario is the communication over weak wireless connections, such as with a Mars probe or the writing and reading of data from hard drives or CDs.

Even though both problems seem to be in oppsition in the beginning, they do have a common theoretical foundation, which we will learn during this pro seminar.

Prerequisits

This pro seminar is only addressed to bachelor students.

No previous knowlege is required.

Organization

Each participant of the seminar will be assigned a specific chapter from one of the books "Information and Coding Theory" by Jones & Jones and "A Student's Guide to Coding and Information Theory" by Moser. He or she is expected to give a talk of about 30 minutes about it and write a paper of about 5 pages summarising it.